Wednesday, 11 February 2015

A few years ago now, I introduce a friend to a couple of films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist. The latter is...perhaps not best described as one of my 'favourite' films, but it is a film that I admire enormously. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on the other hand, is a film that I appreciate somewhat less. Very good, of course, especially in its build up of atmosphere, its creation of an otherworldly-ness without appeal to the supernatural, but...I don't know. It leaves me a little cold.

My friend shared this view, along with an interesting observation: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not as scary as The Exorcist because it happens in, well, Texas, a very specific and localised zone. It has to happen there and not here. Its horror, its monsters, are rooted in a particular geography, a particular context. The Exorcist, on the other hand, could occur here. The monster, the demon, is not tied down to a particular locale. The preamble suggests its origins in the Middle East, out of very distant history. It manifests itself in the United States, in the possession of a young girl far, far removed from where the force emerges from. It doesn't matter where it happens, it can happen anywhere.

It could happen here, in our home.

I heard somewhere that, back in the 80s during the 'Video Nasty' panic, one of the arguments made for strict regulation of home videos went along these lines: it is one thing to go to a cinema to see a violent movie, but quite another to experience that in your own home. Going to the cinema removes the film from the homestead, but bringing it into the home, into the place where one is meant to be safe, that has potential for great danger. The danger is that experiencing something horrific in one's own home undermines its feeling of security, its safety, its very homeliness.

However, I want to discuss another kind of horror. The realisation that the homely was, in fact, never homely at all.

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Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm fond of my walks. Last weekend, I departed from my usual route and found this:

I knew that this monument existed but I wasn't expecting something so...cinematic. Things only got better, however:

This was spooky. Very spooky. This is what I want to explore in this post, a feeling of horror in the home that is not that of the intruder. It is, rather, the recognition of the unhomeliness of the homely. That is, discovering that one's home, the familiar, contains and always has contained an unfamiliar, unsafe dimension. Not that something foreign has entered and changed things, but rather discovering that home was always foreign. This is the feeling so well expressed in David Lynch's Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. The hidden-yet-always-present wrongness of the homely.

That was the feeling I had when I came across this site. This wasn't Texas, this was home. And in home, my home, there was something scary, something wrong, something unfamiliar. You might think that that's a lot to read into a disused farming structure, but the atmosphere, the setting sun, the cold, the silence, the remoteness, the strangeness of it made for a powerful experience.

I live on the outskirts of the city, and as such I'm treated to an unusual environment where, on one side, there is the city and modernity, and on the other side I can walk for miles and meet less than a dozen people. I can simply venture out and walk, and see where I end up. As such, there has always been a feeling of living on a border, that beyond there lies...the outside. There is the rational realisation that this is not the case, that there lie suburbs and towns and villages and roads and pylons, but that isn't how it feels.

I digress.

This is the feeling that Lovecraft is able to conjure. That the horror does not reside far away, it is close, it is near, it is here and always has been. The Old Ones are not a foreign element, they have been here far longer than we have. Our homes where never our homes, they were always unhomely. To notice something that has always been unnoticed, and yet always present, that is so deeply uncomfortable that it is difficult to articulate the sensation.

I think that this is part of the special frisson that the conspiracy theory is able to produce. I treat conspiracy theories as a kind of myth-making, an elaborate, world-structuring fiction whose fictitiousness is not known to those who possess them. Perhaps the appeal is the same appeal as that of a Lovecraft or a Ligotti: beneath the surface of the familiar is something utterly unfamiliar. Familiar things that, nominally, guarantee our security and freedom are, in fact, undermining and robbing us of both these things. Worse than that: these are things we never possessed. The familiar was always other. The government is not and has never been corrupt, it has always been the Illuminati and that is that.

The successful conspiracy theory functions on the same level as a successful horror story.

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I had a dream recently.

I dreamt that near where I live, there was an installation, scientific-military. It was an array of large satellite dishes, angled skywards. Everyone knew, and had always known, that these were not innocent, that they were there for a reason that was not being admitted publicly. That they weren't right.

It wasn't a dark night. The sky was a pale blue, as if it were lit up by a full moon. A kind of not-night. And I am there, near this array which is there for a reason we can only guess at, and there is a man with me. He points to the sky, the clear not-night sky, and I can see around the stars a rippling, like a heat haze. The man says: 'You see that? If you look closely, you can see HAARP at work!'

Sunday, 1 February 2015

In order to prove I am still alive and am still writing, I have decided to perform the relatively simple act of Writing About Things I Have Read. I set myself two rules when constructing this list: I can't count books I've not finished, including anthologies (meaning I have to ignore One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fanged Noumena and House of Leaves). Blogs don't count, but individual pieces on blogs do. The absolute best book I read last year was The Kindly Ones, which I've already written about.

These aren't in any particular order.

Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood

Disturbing, shocking, moving, DEFINITELY NOT SCIENCE FICTION, and only the second Atwood novel I've read, Oryx & Crake was a superb read. A frightening vision of the future as it very well could turn out, and an equally frightening reflection on the uncomfortable contingency of human domination of the world, and even on the need for something that at least does the job of religion, I cannot recommend this book enough.

The book follows the same character along two narrative lines, one set after the (initially nameless) apocalypse, the other winding its way to the events that leave humanity virtually extinct. As such, we know from the beginning that things aren't going to turn out exactly happily ever after. Depressing, yes, but also oddly, though quietly, hopeful. Not read the sequels yet, though I think I'll make them my next read.

The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith

A potent reminder of how imaginative science fiction can be, the criminally under-appreciated Cordwainer Smith (seriously, check out the Wiki. His godfather was Sun Yat-Sen, he was an advisor to President Kennedy and he literally wrote the book on psychological warfare) was a force to be reckoned with. Combining prose that borders on the mythic with an almost uncomfortably heart-felt moral conviction, rooted in his adopted Anglican Christianity, Smith's science fiction is unlike anything I've come across before.

An anthology all set in the same universe, The Rediscovery of Man is reminiscent of Dune with its far-future humanity wracked with decadence and ennui, reliant on the life-extending Santaclara drug, also called 'Stroon', which is found on only one planet in the known universe. The comparisons more or less end there. Humanity is governed by the Instrumentality of Mankind, almost God-like human beings that guard and guide the destiny of the species, defending it from threats that the rest of humanity do not even know exist. There are also the Underpeople, animals radically altered to resemble and think like humans who are used as slaves; the plight of the Underpeople and their struggle for civil rights is one of the major moral, religious and political themes of Smith's stories.

It is very difficult to put in to words how imaginative Smith was. The first story, 'Scanners Live in Vain,' features a caste of modified human beings designed to pilot the great space craft of the Instrumentality, but at the cost of having no sensory perceptions other than sight, meaning they can only communicate by lip-reading and semaphore, and can only tell if they've been damaged by checking the instruments implanted in their chest.

Another story also has a psychic death-ray powered by psychopathic kittens.

Smith was weird, glorious and deserves your attention.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

I wasn't expecting to enjoy Neuromancer quite as much as I did. It gets a lot of bad press for being badly written, though conceptually brilliant. I just really liked it. I approached it with a sense of duty, of having to read this book in order to appreciate its impact, and realised that...it's actually quite well written. Yeah, it's a pulp novel at heart, but it's on the better end of the pulp spectrum. Better than a lot of Lovecraft, even. Some of it isn't as well executed as it could have been, but a lot of it really is.

Creepy, uncomfortable, clever. One of the most accurate (thematically at least) predictions of the future in science fiction to date, forgiving him the absence of mobile phones. Powerful and important, its biggest problem for the modern reader is the fact of its impact. So much of it seems utterly clichéd now that it only becomes bearable when one remembers that this was the first example in fiction of so much that is now genre convention.

There's little else to say: read it, but don't bother with the sequels.

I remember...I remember that once there was...sunshine...and bird song...and laughter...during the...before the...

*inhuman shrieking*

The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

Suffering from a similar fate as Neuromancer in that the scope of its influence somewhat overshadows its own merits as a novel, the saving grace of The Difference Engine is that, on its own, it is much, much better than Neuromancer. A seminal work of alternative history in general, and steampunk generally, depicting a Victorian Britain were Babbage's clockwork computers have brought about sweeping social change. Neither substance nor style overshadow one another, nor do we have to wade through clumsy exposition. The world that Gibson and Sterling have created is one that they only show us glimpses of, hinting at a wider picture without offering us too many details. Frustrating, yes, but the right kind of frustrating.

Forgiving it the narrative laziness of relying on a MacGuffin (the pay off isn't quite worth it, but the coda that follows certainly is), the book's greatest strengths lie in the ideas being presented to the reader. How culture and contingency effects ideology; the relationship between technology, environment and human development; the question of whether or not technology has really made us any more free or simply locked us into a more subtle slavery. The imagery is evocative, the characters a little lacking, perhaps, but the style, concepts and language are excellent, truly excellent throughout.

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Bringing this to a close, a few other great books I read last year were: The Children of Menby the late Baroness James, The Sadean Woman by the even-later Angela Carter, Accelerando by Charles Stross (number 6 on Noah's list) and the provincial, apocalyptic joy that is John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
I will happily accept recommendations for further reading in the comments.

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Any views or opinions presented are mine and not those of my employer. I may chose to discuss things, people and ideas that are unsavoury to others -- this should not be read as an endorsement of these things, ideas or people unless said so explicitly.